Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art.

Except that they simply haven’t.

Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership.

Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you.

> If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.

I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together.

If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you.

Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?

If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own, the right to transfer that NFT is the thing of value, and what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place. Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Let me know when you make it all the way through, happy to continue the conversation.

> If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along),

Wrong.

> I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own.

Yes, you contradict yourself.

> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.

Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves:

> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.

This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

For real estate lawyers, a full understanding of all the laws is important. For someone who might want to buy a house, a rough understanding is sufficient. That's why I provide both. Not everybody needs to know or care about the exact details in order to decide it is worth owning a house. But if they are interested, they can learn. I hope providing both sides of it is seen as useful in that light - it is not self-contradictory to make broad analogies that are useful, then explain exactly in detail where those analogies break down.

> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.

This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.

> I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.

Which you acknowledge here.

This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important to a buyer.

If you tell someone that an NFT conveys ownership of the media, you are lying to them and participating in a con.

The fact that you later contradict that statement, doesn’t change the fact that you lied.

> This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.

The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.

- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.

- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.

- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.

> The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media

This is fine. There is no problem with a club of people who choose to play a game in which they agree that a token has a particular meaning.

The rest of us can point out that it doesn’t mean the same thing outside that club of believers.

Thing is actually assigning IP rights to the owner of the NFT should be trivial as some projects have done. That it’s not done or the IP rights granted are explicitly limited suggests people get that and want to retain ownership of the rights whilst selling the token.

Please, explain to me what legal rights an NFT-holder asserts over someone that claims ownership of your token. Do any countries respect the blockchain enough to take you seriously?

If you own a Meebit NFT it’s actually the extant legal system that determines what that means.

https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions

And note you don’t own the media and that what owning the NFT means can change.

“(b) Ownership. (i) When you purchase a Meebit, you own only the NFT, not any associated Art. Each Meebit is associated with a non-fungible token (an “NFT”) on the Ethereum blockchain. When you acquire a Meebit, you own the NFT, not the associated Art, or any other Meebits Materials (as that term is defined below), or any Third Party IP.”

Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own anything other than the token itself.

That’s what I said and the point I was making is that this is a bog standard contract.

State employed officials with guns will show up and remove you from a house if you are living in it without permission from the person who owns the deed. That is ownership.

There is no thing that another person can do regarding a piece of art backed by an NFT that you own that will cause state employees with guns to show up to stop them.

Unless you own the NFT, you can’t hang up the piece in cryptovoxels. That is ownership.

But owning the NFT is not 1-to-1 with having the right to redistribute or having the right to transfer the right to redistribute. Are you keeping track of which NFTs confer copyright with the purchase? Or are you leaving it to the honor system? In which case, what is the NFT providing?

Giving cryptovoxels a little too much credit. Its one digital museum but there can be infinite other ways to display nfts.

Correct, my point wasn’t to emphasize cryptovoxels but provide an existence proof where holding an NFT confers unique rights. There are many others.

This kind of conferring of unique rights is nothing to do with NFTs.

For example, I can offer a free milkshake to anyone who parks in my parking lot in a yellow car.

Then yellow car isn’t doing anything in this situation, I am, and if I can always change my mind.

Then same is true with cryptovoxels and NFTs.

It has as much to do with NFTs as your example has to do with your parking lot, which is not nothing.

The point is if 1M people all agreed to give a free milkshake to people who parked in your parking lot, the parking lot is pretty important.

What makes you think the parking lot is important? It seems like an entirely incidental detail in your example.

There are paving stones on which a million people walk each year. They are of no more importance than a parking lot in which a particular trade promotion takes place.

I honestly don't know if this comment is a joke or not.

Don’t shoot the messenger - usually stuff like this starts out being dismissed and laughed at. I don’t own any art NFTs buts not hard to grok the thesis of those who do. It’s not about tulips, just like Bitcoin wasn’t.

This comment adds no additional justification for then claims. A lot of people think it’s exactly about tulips, and nobody is making a good argument why it isn’t.

So wait, now we're going back to relying on centralized authority to determine the validity of the token? Seems, say, self-defeating in a sense.

The point is to extrapolate what I wrote.

No it’s not. It’s just a ticket to enter cryptovoxels.

> what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place

BS. That’s the marketing excuse. The real value is only in the fact that you can potentially sell it to a greater fool who will buy for more so you won’t be the one holding the bag. It’s the new tulip mania!

I make it clear what that "ownership" means - the right to control that token on the blockchain. I make it clear that it is not enforced by any legal framework, just the blockchain. What is your issue?

The issue is that you also told this lie:

> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.

Happy to update it. Better?

Again, if you don't like specific wording, I invite you to write a better explanation for regular folks which is simultaneously perfectly accurate in every sense in every phrase and word you use.

> Better?

Not really. The original document contained an outright lie which have now removed because it was exposed.

If you didn’t accept it was a lie, you wouldn’t have removed it.

This has nothing to do with imperfect accuracy. It has to do with you writing an outright falsehood.

In a 1700+ word article, you found two words which were part of an analogy you disagreed with, and admit that the article clarifies in detail all of your concerns. I changed these two words from "just like" to "similar to", which solves your "problem", and you still aren't happy because it was "an outright lie". It was not a lie, only deliberate misinterpretation could possibly frame it that way, so I guess I can't make you happy. Wish you the best though!

At the beginning of an article you told an outright lie. Later you equivocate.

The idea that a lie stops being a lie because of the number of words you say later is obviously absurd.

As I have pointed out this is a motte and Bailey fallacy.

Also, it’s still a completely misleading statement. The change to ‘similar to’ doesn’t make it true. It still isn’t true, only now you have some wiggle room to claim it’s not a lie.

You are still trying to misleading people into thinking that NFTs confer ownership of the media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com